CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD WEEVILS
In winter, when the insect enjoys an enforced rest, the study of numismatics procures me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns his sod. He brings them to me and consults me as to their pecuniary value, never as to their meaning.
What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him, all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle.
I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its legend. And my satisfaction is no small one when the little round bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are witnesses open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts. [[172]]
This bit of silver, flattened by the blow of the punch, talks to me of the Vocontii:[1] “VOOC … VOCVNT,” says the inscription. It comes from the little neighbouring town of Vaison, where Pliny the Naturalist sometimes went to spend a holiday. Here, perhaps, at the table of his host, the celebrated compiler, he learnt to appreciate the beccafico, famous among the epicures of Rome and still renowned to-day, under the name of grasset, among our Provençal gastronomers. It is a shame that my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than a battle.
It shows, on one side, a head and, on the other, a galloping horse, all barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with the point of a pebble on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no more shapeless design. Nay, of a surety, those gallant Allobroges were no artists.
How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocæa! Here is a drachma of the Massalietes:[2] ΜΑΣΣΑΛΙΗΤΩΝ. On the obverse, a head of Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear-drops, a necklace of pearls, a bow slung over the shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the hands of the pious maidens of Syria. To tell the truth, it is not beautiful. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to the ass’s ears which the beauties [[173]]of our days wear perched upon their heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fruitful in the means of uglification! Business knows nothing of beauty, says this divinity of the traders; it prefers the profitable, embellished with luxury. Thus speaks the drachma.
On the reverse, a lion clawing the earth and roaring wide-mouthed. Not of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power under the form of some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of strength. The eagle, the lion and other bandits often figure on the reverse of coins. But the reality is not sufficient; the imagination invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the hippogriff, the unicorn, the double-headed eagle. Are the inventors of these emblems really superior to the redskin who celebrates the prowess of his scalping-knife with a bear’s paw, an eagle’s wing or a jaguar’s tooth stuck into his scalp-lock? We may safely doubt it.
How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own silver coinage brought into circulation of late years! It shows us a sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrow with the good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us think.